Wednesday, November 11, 2009

In notable cases, H1N1 is a stubborn son of a bitch to shake off and get well from, and if not careful it can be overwhelming.

Many other pre-existing medical conditions can contribute to a stubborn case of H1N1.

But with a glimmer of hope, severe cases can be treated with somewhat better prognosis using a novel technique intensive care method called ECMO - ExtraCorporeal Membrane Oxygenation.

Essentially since H1N1 attacks the lungs, the virus is hitting the body's ability to deal with the infection itself by significantly impairing oxygen levels in the circulatory system, when stricken with a severe case of H1N1.

ECMO is an invasive means using a special catheter and external oxygenating membrane to assist in significantly reoxygenate the blood, deficient in oxygen from the reduced functioning of the lungs when infected with a stiff case of H1N1.

A procedure not for the faint of heart, expensive, and definitely a hospital beside procedure with its own risks. There is no huge hospital capacity for this treatment if a widespread pandemic might arrive, as the equipment is expensive and it is a somewhat risky procedure, due to the depth of insertion of a special catheter.

But the ECMO technique seems to be effective in treatment to help severe cases.

Here are some links to articles on ECMO for treatment of severe Swine Flu - H1N1 viral infections :

In any case, a simple means to help limit H1N1 severity, specifically by boosting the immune system, is to take large doses of VITAMIN D - of order of 1gm per day regularly, and if ill, taking 3 -> 4 gms per day, for short term of 3 -4 days duration.

Low vitamin D is apparently a simple risk factor for more severe prognoses of H1N1, and given that Vitamin D is cheap, USE IT.

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Severe flu cases surge in Manitoba aboriginal community

Last Updated: Monday, June 8, 2009 | 4:05 PM CT

The Manitoba government is reporting a surge in the number of people requiring intensive care for influenza-like illnesses, particularly among a relatively young aboriginal population.

The vast majority of people reporting flu-like illnesses this spring are experiencing relatively mild cases and have not required hospitalization, Manitoba's chief medical officer of health, Dr. Joel Kettner, said at a press conference Monday afternoon.

'It's important to recognize that what we have observed is really more severe than what we would expect to see or what we have seen with typical seasonal influenza in the past.'—Dr. Joel Kettner, Manitoba's chief medical officer of health

However, there has been "an increased concentration of severe respiratory illness admitted to the intensive care units, which is higher in number than previous influenza outbreaks," officials with Manitoba Health and Healthy Living stated at the press conference.

As of Sunday night, 26 people were in the intensive care units on ventilators for flu-related reasons. It is expected many of them will be confirmed as cases of swine flu, or the H1N1 influenza A virus, officials said, noting more than half of the people are of aboriginal descent with an average age of 35, said Kettner.

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority is taking steps to provide enough support to intensive-care units and prioritizing patients for personal-care home beds. The WRHA has also acquired 15 additional ventilators that will be put to use as needed, officials said.

Normally at this time of year, there are 30-35 patients using hospital ventilators for various reasons. The 26 people requiring the devices due to flu-like illnesses are in addition to those patients.

Typically, at this time of year, there are very few — if any — cases of severe flu.

"It's important to recognize that what we have observed is really more severe than what we would expect to see or what we have seen with typical seasonal influenza in the past," said Kettner.

Non-urgent surgeries may be postponed

The WRHA authority may also defer non-urgent surgical procedures that would normally require ICU care, said health officials.

As well, the Public Health Agency of Canada has provided three epidemiologists to Manitoba to assist in assessing cases of influenza-like illness.

There are 40 people in Manitoba with confirmed cases of swine flu. There were no new cases announced Monday.

Health authorities announced last week 27 new cases of the H1N1 virus in Manitoba, affecting people between the ages of one month and 56 years. Of the new cases, three patients required treatment in hospital.

Illnesses afflict communities of St. Theresa Point and Dauphin

As well, more than 200 people from St. Theresa Point First Nation, located about 500 kilometres from Winnipeg, reported being ill last week. Of those, 21 were transported to Winnipeg hospitals and two were confirmed to have swine flu. The majority of the ill are being treated in the community.

Also, a flu-like outbreak kept hundreds of students away from schools in Dauphin, Man., last week.

The provincial government is encouraging the public to maintain their immune systems by making healthy food choices, being physically active and getting enough sleep.

Other tips to prevent the spread of any germs include:

Covering a cough or sneeze, using a tissue or the inside of the elbow.

Washing hands often with soap and water, especially after a cough or sneeze.

Avoiding touching eyes, nose or mouth.

Those with flu-like symptoms, such as fever, cough, aches and fatigue, are most contagious for about one week. During that time, people are encouraged to stay home from school or work and limit contact with others to reduce the chance of spreading the virus.

Anyone seeking advice or care can call Health Links at 204-788-8200 or 1-888-315-9257.

Monday, April 07, 2008

Possible Light at the End of the MRSA tunnel ?

here are some recent news releases about a strategy to possibly treat MRSA using extracts from Alligator blood. Now that would be neat ! Only hints of a strategy as yet but the old gators might have something to help out on the war on MRSA.

Sunday, April 06, 2008

When is the Tipping Point on Gas Prices ?

An interesting question to ask is - at what price level for US average Gasoline prices at the pump will serve to catalyze a change in automobile fueling? To biofuels or otherwise, that may render significant changes in the marketplace.

Will this take 5 dollar gasoline which is approaching with almost inevitability? Will industry - fueling and vehicle manufacturers actually react in a timely manner to make the most of the potential market opportunity? That biofuel manufacturers might have sufficient supplies of compatible fuels, or vehicles and fueling stations for alternative fuel vehicles might be available in sufficient quantity to have a material effect in providing a solution to power the economy?

Something to think about.

Visible speed of change in the market is presently slow, but will there be a solution in time to avoid an otherwise possible brake to the general economy? or a catalyst to a new vehicle and fueling infrastructure that takes up the slack?

Friday, February 22, 2008

in plain english - after just a FDA Phase 1 B clinical testing, Adherex is granted the following status for ADH-1 in Melanoma combo with mephalan ( definition taken from FDA site )""Orphan Product Designation

The Orphan Drug Act (ODA) provides for granting special status to a product to treat a rare disease or condition upon request of a sponsor. The combination of the product to treat the rare disease or condition must meet certain criteria. This status is referred to as orphan designation. Orphan designation qualifies the sponsor of the product for the tax credit and marketing incentives of the ODA. A marketing application for a prescription drug product that has been designated as a drug for a rare disease or condition is not subject to a prescription drug user fee unless the application includes an indication for other than a rare disease or condition.""

This milestone from the firm was a herculean task achieved by the brilliant team lead by Dr. Peters and Dr. Norris.

The news is so fresh firm this morning, that when I called their offices to congratulate the team, the receptionist was unaware that the FDA orphan drug status had been granted, nor did she understand the significance.

For a refresher of some things Adherex, google > "wendman adherex genesis" and read the post describing early days of the firm after renewal of management by the then fresh merger / takeover by the Oxiquant team.

This recent FDA orphan status approval is likely the mere beginning of realization of the promise of the firm's technology, a significant milestone in the quest by Prof. Orest Blaschuk of McGill and others to apply Cadherin technology to cancer treatments. It has been a long and arduous journey to this amazing first substantive FDA milestone by Adherex.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NORTH CAROLINA--(MARKET WIRE)--Feb 22, 2008 -- Adherex Technologies Inc. (Toronto:AHX.TO - News)(AMEX:ADH - News), a biopharmaceutical company with a broad portfolio of oncology products under development, today announced that it has received orphan drug designation for ADH-1 from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The designation was granted for the use of ADH-1 in conjunction with melphalan for the treatment of Stage IIB/C, III, and IV malignant melanoma. Adherex is currently conducting a Phase IIb expansion trial in melanoma using systemic ADH-1 in combination with regional melphalan.

"FDA orphan drug designation for ADH-1 is an important asset in Adherex's development of this drug," said Dr. William P. Peters, CEO and Chairman of Adherex. "Orphan drug designation provides multiple incentives for Adherex to continue its accelerated development of ADH-1 for this significant clinical problem. Melanoma is a disease with an extremely poor prognosis and one in which the molecular target for ADH-1, N-cadherin, is frequently and often intensively expressed. N-cadherin is also intimately involved in the invasion and metastasis of melanoma. Our experience to date combining ADH-1 and melphalan for the treatment of in-transit melanoma has been very encouraging. To continue with the rapid development of this combination, two additional centers, Lehigh Valley and H. Lee Moffitt, have joined our Phase IIb trial which is ongoing at Duke and the MD Anderson. All four participating institutions are first-class medical centers with experienced investigators, and we are very pleased to have them involved in this development program."

Adherex is currently evaluating the synergy of systemic ADH-1 in combination with regionally-infused melphalan for the treatment of melanoma in a Phase I/IIb trial. The Lehigh Valley Hospital in Pennsylvania and the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center in Florida are being added as additional clinical trial sites to provide further multi-institutional experience. The Phase IIb portion of this trial is anticipated to complete patient accrual by approximately mid-2008, with data to be released at an appropriate scientific venue.

Another Phase I trial is also nearing completion at US Oncology in which systemic ADH-1 is being evaluated in combination with three different systemic chemotherapies: ADH-1 + docetaxel (Taxotere®), ADH-1 + carboplatin, and ADH-1 + capecitabine (Xeloda®). Subsequent Phase II and potential randomized, prospective trials of ADH-1 in combination with chemotherapy will be planned and based upon the results of the combination studies currently ongoing.

About Adherex Technologies

Adherex Technologies Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery and development of novel cancer therapeutics. We aim to be a leader in developing innovative treatments that address important unmet medical needs in cancer. We currently have multiple products in the clinical stage of development, including eniluracil, ADH-1 and sodium thiosulfate (STS). Eniluracil, an oral dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) inhibitor, was previously under development by GlaxoSmithKline for oncology indications. ADH-1, our lead biotechnology compound, selectively targets N-cadherin, a protein present on certain tumor cells and established blood vessels that feed solid tumors. STS, a drug from our specialty pharmaceuticals pipeline, protects against the disabling hearing loss that can often result from treatment with platinum-based chemotherapy drugs. With a diversified portfolio of unique preclinical and clinical-stage cancer compounds and a management team with expertise in identifying, developing and commercializing novel cancer therapeutics, Adherex is emerging as a pioneering oncology company. For more information, please visit our website at www.adherex.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve significant risks and uncertainties. The actual results, performance or achievements of the Company might differ materially from the results, performance or achievements of the Company expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements include, without limitation, those regarding the development plans of the Company and the expected results of our development. We can provide no assurance that such development will proceed as currently anticipated or that the expected results of such development will be realized. We are subject to various risks, including the uncertainties of clinical trials, drug development and regulatory review, the early stage of our product candidates, our reliance on collaborative partners, our need for additional capital to fund our operations, our history of losses, and other risks inherent to the biopharmaceutical industry. For a more detailed discussion of related risk factors, please refer to our public filings available at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov.

Monday, February 18, 2008

Some folks in the north recently have been to put it mildly freezing their rears off. The past month of January 2008 has seen in the arctic temperatures well in the -30s C and -40s C range since late January, with the mercury dipping past -50 C in some areas. ref CBC article "Recent cold snap helping Arctic sea ice, scientists find" of Feb 15th 2008

Satellite telemetry image data is indicating that the cold snap is helping the Arctic oceanice increase in area by about 750,000 square miles, in comparison to average winter icepack area in the prior three years. For reference, the low in summer 2007 was 1.61 million square miles, so this recent cold snap icepack growth is not immaterial, but it is as yet unclear if this is any kind of trend. Not likely, more likely it is just a normal blip long overdue.

It is nice to get some real winter weather again, much like in the early 70's of my long lost youth. Makes for great skiing and other winter sports.

RESEARCH TRIANGLE PARK, NORTH CAROLINA--(MARKET WIRE)--Jan 17, 2008 -- Adherex Technologies Inc. (Toronto:AHX.TO - News)(AMEX:ADH - News), a biopharmaceutical company with a broad portfolio of oncology products under development, today announced that it has completed patient enrollment in the Phase I portion of the clinical trial of systemic ADH-1 in combination with isolated limb infusion melphalan and is proceeding with a multi-institutional Phase IIb expansion of the study.

"We have completed the Phase I portion of this study at Duke with a satisfactory safety profile at all three ADH-1 doses tested and initial tumor response data that have exceeded our expectations based upon the center's historical experience with mephalan alone," said William P. Peters, MD, PhD, Chairman and CEO of Adherex. "However, while positive, we consider the data to be early and limited both in terms of the number of patients and the length of follow-up. We have therefore decided to expand the trial to provide additional patients and more information for planning potential pivotal trials."

The Company plans to expand the clinical trial of systemic ADH-1 in combination with isolated limb infusion melphalan for the treatment of melanoma by up to 25 additional patients. Further, the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas has been added as an additional clinical trial site to gain multi-institutional experience. This Phase IIb expansion of the trial is anticipated to complete patient accrual by approximately mid-2008 and data will be released at an appropriate scientific venue.

About Adherex Technologies

Adherex Technologies Inc. is a biopharmaceutical company dedicated to the discovery and development of novel cancer therapeutics. We aim to be a leader in developing innovative treatments that address important unmet medical needs in cancer. We currently have multiple products in the clinical stage of development, including eniluracil, ADH-1 and sodium thiosulfate (STS). Eniluracil, an oral dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase (DPD) inhibitor, was previously under development by GlaxoSmithKline for oncology indications. ADH-1, our lead biotechnology compound, selectively targets N-cadherin, a protein present on certain tumor cells and established blood vessels that feed solid tumors. STS, a drug from our specialty pharmaceuticals pipeline, protects against the disabling hearing loss that can often result from treatment with platinum-based chemotherapy drugs. With a diversified portfolio of unique preclinical and clinical-stage cancer compounds and a management team with expertise in identifying, developing and commercializing novel cancer therapeutics, Adherex is emerging as a pioneering oncology company. For more information, please visit our website at www.adherex.com.

This press release contains forward-looking statements that involve significant risks and uncertainties. The actual results, performance or achievements of the Company might differ materially from the results, performance or achievements of the Company expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements include, without limitation, those regarding the development plans of the Company and the expected timing or results of our development. We can provide no assurance that the development will proceed as currently anticipated or that the expected timing or results of the development will be realized. We are subject to various risks, including the uncertainties of clinical trials, drug development and regulatory review, the early stage of our product candidates, our reliance on collaborative partners, our need for additional capital to fund our operations, our history of losses, and other risks inherent to the biopharmaceutical industry. For a more detailed discussion of related risk factors, please refer to our public filings available at www.sedar.com and www.sec.gov.

Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Here is a series of video classes given at Google campus covering many subjects in Digital Photography and Imaging - the class series is called PhotoTechEDU - online at YouTube - in the Google Tech Talk topical section.

This series of engineering grade lectures covers in depth many aspects of digital imaging, image processing/ editing and photography.

The main entry to all of Google Tech Talks is linked above in the blog post title

Monday, January 21, 2008

Here is a partial list of videos of interesting presentations given at Google on various topics related to Clean Technologies. Makes for fascinating viewing from the numerous thought provoking speakers.

If one has access to a broadband connection be sure to have a look at these talks.

The page title link is to the entire topics of Google campus Tech Talks - with an emphasis on software, but covering many fascinating subject materials.

The talks liked below are those I have found so far that relate to clean technologies.

Wednesday, January 02, 2008

So if you are a real powder hound snow skier and lust after the fluffy white stuff, unfettered by long lines or crowds, and are able to revel in amazing vistas and superb slopes, check out Shames Mountain in Terrace British Columbia, where snow falls even when further south it does not.

Saturday, July 14, 2007

Recent medical research is questioning fundamental ideas about how to best revive victims of heart attacks and oxygen deprivation. Dr. Lance Becker of Penn is on the forefront of research that indicates opportunities in patient revival exist where otherwise current practice of administering concentrated oxygen at normal body temperatures might actually be finalizing or contributing to unnecessary deaths.

A key technical observation seems to be that the rate/(concentration) at which oxygen is returned to the patient in present revival protocols, if too fast as presently quite common practice, seems to inadvertently kill the patient by permanently triggering a death sequence initiated by cell mitochondria.

Dr. Becker observes that cooling the patient and slowing the return of oxygen with revived heartbeat, might inhibit the catalysis of permanent death by a mitochondrial switch, and seems to offer increased chances of revival from death in numerous cases otherwise conventionally deemed hopeless.

Of only about 225 hospitals, out of more than 5,700 hospitals in the United States have this critical equipment needed for saving lives from permanent death.

Ask if your local hospitals have this critical hypothermia(cooling) inducing equipment, if they don't, then bang the doors of complacency DOWN, crack open the inertia of the physicians, and get the hospital to both BUY the hypothermia induction equipment, and for staff in emergency medicine to read the later and earlier articles linked above, and many protocols to start saving heart attack victims NOW.

If your local hospital does not do this quickly, then plaster copies of these articles throughout hospital department staff mailboxes, and get your local newspapers to write articles about Dr. Becker's work ASAP.

If all it took was cooling your loved one soon after an otherwise fatal heart attack to bring them back to life, and your hospital did not do this just because of complacency with current commonly accepted but WRONG therapies, shame them into learning Dr. Becker's techniques NOW, even for ambulance treatments.

Cooling Device Manufacturers and Assigned Patents (note these may in some cases include patents unrelated to patient cooling)

This appears to be excellent innovative medical science, that might well soon transform patient prognoses for the better.

Here is an excerpt from the recent Newsweek article of July 2007By Jerry Adler with Matthew Philips, Joan Raymond and Julie Scelfo

"How long has it been since you've read an article about heart attacks that didn't mention saturated fats? Our age is obsessed with "health," but when health fails, the last line of defense is in the emergency room, where doctors patrol the border between life and death—a boundary that they have come to see as increasingly uncertain, even porous. This is a story about what happens when your heart stops: about new research into how brain cells die and how something as simple as lowering body temperature may keep them alive—research that could ultimately save as many as 100,000 lives a year. And it's about the mind as well, the visions people report from their deathbeds and the age-old questions about what, if anything, outlives the body.

It begins with a challenge to something doctors have always been taught in medical school: that after about five minutes without a pulse, the brain starts dying, followed by heart muscle—the two most voracious consumers of oxygen in the body, victims of their own appetites. The emerging view is that oxygen deprivation is merely the start of a cascade of reactions within and outside the cells that can play out over the succeeding hours, or even days. Dying turns out to be almost as complicated a process as living, and somehow, among its labyrinthine pathways, Bondar found a way out.

Monica tried to recall what she had learned in a CPR class decades earlier. She bent over Bondar and began pushing down on his chest, then rushed back to the kitchen to dial 911. "My husband is dying!" she gasped to the operator.

Compressing Bondar's chest would have sent a trickle of blood to his brain, supplying a fraction of its normal oxygen consumption, not enough to bring him back to consciousness. But the West Deptford police station was only three blocks away, and within two minutes of Monica's call three officers arrived with a defibrillator. They placed the pads on Bondar's chest, delivered two jolts of electricity to his heart, and got a pulse back. Soon paramedics arrived with oxygen and rushed him to a nearby community hospital. The report Monica received there after an hour was equivocal: Bondar was "stable"—his heart rate and blood pressure back to near normal—but he was still in a coma. It was then that Monica made a decision that may have saved his life. She asked that her husband be moved the 15 miles to Penn, the region's leading university hospital.

Dr. Lance Becker, director of Penn's year-old Center for Resuscitation Science, frequently dreams about mitochondria: tubular structures within cells, encasing convoluted membranes where oxygen and glucose combine to produce the energy the body uses in moving everything from molecules across cell membranes to barbells. Recently mitochondria have been in the news because they have their own DNA, which is inherited exclusively down the female line of descent, making them a useful tool for geneticists and anthropologists.

But Becker is interested in mitochondria for another reason: he believes they are the key to his audacious goal of tripling the time during which a human being can go without a heartbeat and still be revived. That the five-minute rule is not absolute has been known for a long time, and the exceptions seem to involve low temperatures.

Children who fall through ice may survive unexpectedly long immersions in cold water. On Napoleon's Russian campaign, his surgeon general noticed that wounded infantrymen, left on the snowy ground to recover, had better survival rates than officers who stayed warm near the campfire. Becker is hoping to harness this effect to save lives today.

Becker is 53, slender and boyish in a way that belies his thinning hair; his typical greeting to colleagues is a jaunty "What's up, guys?" For his lab he has assembled a high-powered team from a wide range of specialties, including a brilliant young neuroscientist, Dr. Robert Neumar; an emergency-medicine specialist, Dr. Ben Abella; plus cardiologists, biochemists, bioengineers and a mouse-heart surgeon. His associate director, Dr. Vinay Nadkarni, comes from pediatrics.

Becker has in effect re-created at Penn, on a more ambitious scale, the laboratory he founded in 1995 at the University of Chicago, with a grant of $50,000 from the philanthropist Jay Pritzker. Ten years earlier Pritzker had walked into the emergency room at Chicago's Michael Reese Hospital complaining of chest pains, and crumpled to the floor. Becker resuscitated him, the beginning of both a rewarding friendship (Pritzker lived for 14 more years) and a new direction for Becker's career. "Every day since then," he says, "I would go home and wonder why Jay Pritzker got a second chance and so many other people didn't."

Becker's interest in mitochondria reflects a new understanding about how cells die from loss of circulation, or ischemia. Five minutes without oxygen is indeed fatal to brain cells, but the actual dying may take hours, or even days. Doctors have known for a long time that the consequences of ischemia play out over time. "Half the time in cardiac arrest, we get the heart going again, blood pressure is good, everything is going along," says Dr. Terry Vanden Hoek, director of the Emergency Resuscitation Center at the University of Chicago, "and within a few hours everything crashes and the patient is dead."

It took some time, though, for basic research to supply an explanation. Neumar, working with rats, simulates cardiac arrest and resuscitation, and then examines the neurons at intervals afterward. Up to 24 hours later they appear normal, but then in the next 24 hours, something kicks in and they begin to deteriorate. And Dr. James R. Brorson of the University of Chicago has seen something similar in neural cells grown in culture; deprive them of oxygen and watch for five minutes, or even much longer, and not much happens. "If your car runs out of gas, your engine isn't destroyed, it just needs fuel," he says.

Cell death isn't an event; it's a process. And in principle, a process can be interrupted. The process appears to begin in the mitochondria, which control the cell's self-destruct mechanism, known as apoptosis, and a related process, necrosis.

Apoptosis is a natural function, destroying cells that are no longer needed or have been damaged in some way. Cancer cells, which might otherwise be killed by apoptosis, survive by shutting down their mitochondria; cancer researchers are looking for ways to turn them back on. Becker is trying to do the opposite, preventing cells that have been injured by lack of oxygen from, in effect, committing suicide.

It's a daunting problem. "We're asking the questions," says one leading researcher, Dr. Norm Abramson of the University of Pittsburgh. "We just haven't found the answers." Until recently, the conventional wisdom was that apoptosis couldn't be stopped once it was underway. It proceeds by a complex sequence of reactions—including inflammation, oxidation and cell-membrane breakdown—none of which seems to respond to traditional therapies. Becker views cell death in cardiac arrest as a two-step process, beginning with oxygen deprivation, which sets up the cell for apoptosis; then the heart starts up again and the patient gets a lungful of oxygen, triggering what is called reperfusion injury. The very substance required to save the patient's life ends up injuring or killing him.

Researchers have ransacked their arsenal of drugs looking for ways to interrupt this sequence. Over the years they have tried various techniques on nearly 100,000 patients around the world. None has shown any benefits, according to Dr. A. Michael Lincoff, director of cardiovascular research at the Cleveland Clinic. But one thing does seem to work, something so obvious and low-tech that doctors have a hard time accepting it. It's hypothermia, the intentional lowering of body temperature, down to about 92 degrees Fahrenheit, or 33 Celsius.

Research by a European team in 2002 reported favorable results from a controlled study of several hundred cardiac-arrest patients; subjects who were cooled both had better survival rates and less brain damage than a control group. The first big international conference on cooling took place in Colorado this February. Despite favorable studies and the endorsement of the American Heart Association, "we were concerned that [hypothermia] still wasn't catching on," says the conference organizer, Dr. Daniel Herr of Washington Hospital Center in Washington, D.C.

The two leading manufacturers of cooling equipment—Medivance, Inc., and Gaymar Industries—say only about 225 hospitals, out of more than 5,700 in the United States, have installed machines for inducing hypothermia. Herr says the treatment requires a "paradigm shift" by doctors. "People have a hard time believing that something as simple as cooling can make such a big difference." Perhaps that's because no one quite understands how cooling works. It appears to work globally on apoptosis, rather than on any of the individual biochemical pathways involved in it. "The short answer is, we don't know," says Neumar.

Researchers have also been looking into the way patients get oxygen during resuscitation, and afterward. The treatment goal in cardiac arrest has been to rush oxygen to the heart and brain at maximum concentration; the mask the paramedic pops on your mouth supplies it at 100 percent. "The problem with that," says Dr. Ronald Harper of UCLA, "is it does some very nasty things to the brain." Harper believes a mixture containing 5 percent carbon dioxide would buffer those negative effects, but the idea is still controversial.

At the University of Maryland, Dr. Robert Rosenthal and Dr. Gary Fiskum have been looking into whether oxygen concentrations should be dialed down much more aggressively. In their lab, dogs with induced cardiac arrest recovered better when they were taken off full oxygen after just 12 minutes, compared with an hour in the control group. Rosenthal says in practice patients sometimes are left on pure oxygen for much longer than an hour—in one hospital he studied, for as much as 121 hours.

At Penn, Becker's Resuscitation Center coordinates with the Emergency Department on a protocol for cooling patients in cardiac arrest. "We look at their prior mental state," says Dr. Dave Gaieski. "If someone was in a coma in a nursing home, we're not going to cool them." The same goes for patients whose hearts stopped for longer than an hour. Since 2005 just 14 patients have met Penn's criteria for hypothermia. Eight survived, six of them with complete recovery. No one knows how many others were saved by cooling around the country.

Bondar arrived at Penn at about 1:30 a.m., still comatose, minutes ticking away while he was evaluated for cooling. Once the decision was made, the team sprang into action, injecting him with an infusion of chilled saline—two liters at about 40 degrees—then wrapping him in plastic tubes filled with chilled, circulating water. Becker believes, based on animal work, that cooling patients even sooner—ideally, on their way to the hospital—would be even more effective, and part of the work of his lab involves perfecting an injectable slurry of saline and ice that could be administered by a paramedic. Bondar was kept at about 92 degrees for about a day, then allowed to gradually return to normal temperature. He remained stable, but unresponsive, over the next three days, while Monica stayed at his bedside. She finally went home Sunday evening, and was awakened Monday by a call from the hospital that she was sure meant bad news.

"Guess what?" said the voice on the other end. "Bill's awake."

Bondar's first words were, "How did I get here?" He had lost track of a full week, from about two days before his heart attack until he woke up. That's not unusual; short-term memory is often the first casualty of cardiac arrest. Neumar says certain cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that forms new memories, are for unknown reasons especially sensitive to ischemia. Another Penn patient, Sean Quinn, was 20 and a student at Drexel University when he went into unexplained cardiac arrest in 2005. He was one of the earliest patients cooled at Penn, and there's reason to believe that it saved his life, but the continuing memory deficit has prevented him from returning to college."

........................

"We are, Becker believes, at the forefront of a revolution in emergency medicine destined to save millions of lives in the years ahead. This is doctoring at its most basic, wresting people back from death. "I have been fighting with death for 20 years," he says. "And I'll keep doing it, I think, until I meet him in person."

Bless you Dr. Becker .... we need more physicians using your excellent research work NOW.

The California Nanosystems Instituteat UC Santa Barbara will be namedElings Hall as depicted

(Santa Barbara, Calif.) – Virgil Elings and Betty Elings Wells have made a $12.5 million gift to UC Santa Barbara to support pioneering research at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI). In recognition of their recent gift, the new building that is home to the prestigious California Institute for Science and Innovation will be named in honor of Virgil Elings.

The CNSI is a multidisciplinary research partnership between UCLA and UC Santa Barbara established by the state in 2000 with the support of the state legislature and California industry. By exploring the power and potential of manipulating structures molecule-by-molecule, the CNSI is on its way to creating revolutionary new materials, devices, and systems that will enhance virtually every aspect of our lives – helping to drive California's economy through innovations in medical delivery and health care, powerful new information technologies, energy efficient devices, environmental improvements, and more.

The Elings and Wells gift is the largest contribution to The Campaign for UC Santa Barbara, which seeks to raise $500 million to ensure UCSB's excellence for future generations. With this recent gift, a total of $415 million has been contributed to the campaign by alumni and friends.

"UCSB is sincerely grateful to Virgil and Betty for their extraordinary generosity, we are pleased to have our building for the California NanoSystems Institute bear the Elings name," said UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang. "Virgil and Betty's vision for our campus began over 40 years ago, with their shared goals of scholarship and innovation in scientific and business pursuits. As a UCSB professor of physics, Virgil Elings had the foresight to bring the best science graduates and quality research and design together. This integration of science and industry proved to be a winning combination, as it is today at the California NanoSystems Institute."

Virgil Elings is a former UCSB professor of physics who made fundamental contributions leading to the scientific revolution at the nanoscale. In 1987, he co-founded Digital Instruments (DI), the first company to make the power of atomic scanning probe microscopy readily available to scientists and engineers, enabling them to view and explore nanoscale features and structures never seen before – a critical starting point in nanoscience and nanotechnology.

"Our company, Digital Instruments, was a part of the beginning of what people today call nanotechnology," said Virgil Elings. "We also made our money in Santa Barbara, and this is one of many gifts we are making to give back to the community in which we have prospered."

During their marriage, Betty Elings Wells was a real estate investor and business partner with her former husband, Virgil Elings. Together, they launched numerous entrepreneurial ventures, including Digital Instruments, where she was office manager and secretary of the corporation.

Wells said that she made the gift to UCSB to honor her former husband and mentor, the devoted employees at Digital Instruments – many of whom were UCSB graduates – , and to support the university she has been affiliated with since her arrival in Santa Barbara 40 years ago.

"Virgil has made a huge impact on the world by advancing nanoscience, and I think his name should be carried forward," said Wells. "He is a brilliant scientist, inventor, and educator who was able to accomplish what many men dream about and few make real. My desire to help fund education and research in Elings Hall is also an expression of gratitude to our employees at Digital Instruments, since the building will be dedicated to them as well. It is my hope that UCSB will continue the level of exciting research that transpired within the walls of Digital Instruments."

The CNSI building, now known as Elings Hall, stands near the eastern entrance to the campus and is the hub for nanoscience research at UCSB. The institute fosters collaborative research and builds on the substantial and collective strengths of the College of Engineering and the sciences. It also brings together innovators from California universities, industries, and national laboratories and trains the next generation of innovators and entrepreneurs.

The Elings and Wells gift will significantly advance nanoscience research at the institute as well as in engineering and the sciences. It will provide $9 million in unrestricted support to develop and implement innovative research and education initiatives and create new laboratory facilities. In addition, a $3.5 million endowment for the CNSI will generate ongoing resources to build and sustain state-of-the-art programs and to allow rapid response to new scientific and educational opportunities.

Evelyn Hu, UCSB professor of electrical and computer engineering and scientific director of the CNSI, noted that the factors leading to Digital Instruments' extraordinary success – innovation, ingenuity, hard work, dedication, and bringing together a core group of people who share a vision – "map so well onto what is underway today at CNSI."

"Virgil and Betty's gift and the confidence that it implies through its support of this new enterprise at UCSB is coming exactly at the right time, allowing us to bring nanoscience research to the next level," said Hu. "We are now well poised to launch a set of research and education programs that may define critical pathways in science and engineering for the next decade and beyond."

About the Donors

Virgil Elings and Betty Elings Wells are partners in their philanthropic support of the California NanoSystems Institute at UC Santa Barbara and several community projects, including Elings Park in Santa Barbara and the Elings Aquatic Center at Dos Pueblos High School.

Their $12.5 million gift to the campus is the largest contribution to The Campaign for UC Santa Barbara. With this recent gift, they join UCSB's Lancaster Society Leaders, which recognizes cumulative donors to the campus of $10 million and above.

In recognition of their generosity, the building housing the California NanoSystems Institute will be named Elings Hall.

Virgil Elings, who earned his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a professor of physics at UCSB for more than 20 years before he co-founded Digital Instruments (DI) in 1987 with Gus Gurley, a UCSB alumnus.

Digital Instruments had a simple goal – to make the power of scanning probe microscopy readily available to scientists and engineers, enabling them to view and explore nanoscale features and structures never seen before. That year, they constructed the first commercially successful scanning tunneling microscope. It was a critical starting point for nanoscience and nanotechnology.

DI received several awards for business and engineering excellence, including three Photonics Circle of Excellence awards and local, state, and national new product awards from the Society of Professional Engineers. In 1992, DI was ranked No. 150 in the INC 500 list of the 500 fastest growing private companies in the U.S. In 1998, the corporation merged with Veeco Instruments, a leading supplier of instrumentation for the research, semiconductor, data storage, telecommunications, and other industries. By combining the technological strengths of each company, the newly formed company added the distinction of being the world leader in 3-D surface metrology.

Elings, who holds 42 patents, served as the company's president and chairman of the board until his retirement in 1999.

At UCSB, he has been a mentor for the Technology Management Program. He has also been a guest speaker in the program's entrepreneur lecture series and in the Economics Department.

Elings, who resides in Santa Ynez, is a rancher and lavender farmer. He displays his collection of vintage and rare motorcycles and European race bikes at his motorcycle museum in Solvang.

Betty Elings Wells is a successful real estate investor and property manager in the Santa Barbara area, Iowa, and Arizona.

She earned a B.A. in history with a minor in political science from the State College of Boston, while her former husband, Virgil Elings, was completing his Ph.D. in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

After moving to Santa Barbara, Wells began her property management career in Isla Vista, building investment capital for the couple's business ventures in which she was actively involved. For Digital Instruments, the company co-founded by Virgil Elings, she was office manager and secretary of the corporation.

At UCSB, Wells served two terms as president of the Faculty Women's Club, and continues her involvement with the organization as a generous benefactor of student scholarships awarded by the club.

Betty Wells and Virgil Elings have two children, Michael and Jeffrey, who are both engineers. Michael graduated with a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Colorado, and Jeffrey was awarded a degree in mechanical engineering from UC San Diego.

Wells resides in Goleta.

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ED - as typical, I tend to post on what I have known or had some connection to. I worked for Virgil directly as a grunt engineer, doing my nanotech process and device development in scanning microscope nano probes for some 6 years. The best scientist businessman I have ever met or had the pleasure of working for. BAR NONE. Pragmatic and down to earth to a fault ("don't ship till it works", "you don't know anything until it works completely"(ie don't exaggerate incremental partial successes and don't be prematurely content till it is DONE), competitive and thoughtful like few others.

Hated business BS puffery that did not contribute to profits, saw and understood and lived the imperative of healthy ongoing innovating, inventing and patenting, ( and taught many to understand this ). The old R&D Magazine editorial of his - Invent or Die for Technology Startups and Ventures, was tempered with the sage understanding of don't just patent willy nilly, but do so strategically ( he rarely wanted to patent / or bother with patenting until something worked - ie was worth putting the effort into protecting, rather than mere speculation of same ) and yet he licensed when strategic and worthwhile too. Oh and read the patent literature profusely, else how the heck can you invent? (file cabinet drawerS full of patents of competitors) This imperative for reading profusely is lost upon so many, as to defy common sense, but he made up for others weaknesses in spades !

Best of all is Virgil's priceless wit, sly mischievous smile, and sage guidance of many many folks over the years. There was an interesting anecdote about a dart board in his visitors chair in his office (next to a restored motorcycle), in days during the transition to the acquisition by the new acquiring firm, that was priceless and remains true to this very day. Darts eh? (or will that be a sales forecast you want Eduardo? ..... I'll give you darts instead.) Yet Virgil knew the imperative of a vigorous competitive sales staff and hired one of the best in the sales business ...

And to those who love motorcycles, Virgil always had bikes that he just completed restoration of in the company building and always one or 2 parked in his office. He raced competitively in a classic bike race circuit often with his son Jeff, and his collection of superbly restored historically significant mostly racing motorcycles, can be seen here at the Solvang Motorcycle Museum.

What a guy I tell you, brilliant beyond compare and despite at times a well known gruff outward demeanor, a heart of gold inside, and one of the most productive applied technologists I have ever seen. ( and success in applied technology innovation is the true litmus test of brilliance far beyond theory alone or half completed development, outside of commercial realm) Virgil is the real deal, a one in a million.

Under Virgil's sage leadership, the speed that Digital Instruments innovated at, could blind you if you bothered to look, and innovated successfully enough to both capture and retain 50% world wide SPM microscope market share. Moreover this invention machine achieved doing the unthinkable - a US firm owning the majority of SPM instrument market inside Japan due to the unparalleled reputation the instruments and company garnered in the worldwide scientific community.

Friday, June 22, 2007

Prof Orest Blachuk of McGill University Dept. of Urology has racked up an impressive portfolio of patents and patent applications. He is cofounder of Adherex Technology and its scientific luminary. Adherex is on the path to some significant advances in cancer treatment prognoses.